As a young man, well, even as a very young man, truth told, I "understood" Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Diana Dors. My intuition was well along by kindergarten. I remember "waking", at 5, as if from a pleasant reverie, to the queries of Sally Todd, on her own mat near… Read full post »

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Even though
I think at times
I am the genius
I think I am,

I think in fact
I am NOT the genius
I think I am.

I sit at the seafoam table with my glass of port and a small peach, uneaten. Rickie Lee Jones, in my ears, bends and slides, finishing off We Belong Together. Once again port has given me moments of perfect indifference, and I imagine every dip of my head is just-right hipster… Read full post »

When men see me they think of sausage.
I have no swerve; they grin at me like I am fucking Bigfoot.
They don't blink when they look at my neck, and the perfect circular
crease where it rests on my round shoulders.
I have the Wrong Round,
the thick… Read full post »

We are birds in the canopy.
We hear each other sing,
we squabble,
we pine for each other, and
fly from place to place.

We carouse the night for love
work the day for worms
and, regular as dirt,
we finish under the canopy,
unnamed, indistinguishable
from the brown stems and… Read full post »

I shake in the shotgun diner,
hungover, transfixed. Even Lucetta
when she brings blackened hashbrowns
and quivery eggs sees it.

I hold the table rim, my left hand
along the outside edge, my right
above my guts, thumb atop the ribbed chrome,
senor wences, afraid to un-clench.

I stare through the glass door
an… Read full post »

I heard a preacher on channel 22 who preached how certain wise Bible scholars, holy scripture experts, have determined we would all be 30 in heaven. Even fetuses, 5th graders, the elderly, all of the Saved: transformed into lithe and eager 30. God's wisdom, he said. 

And I pictured… Read full post »

viz Olga Little's unfortunate event:

 _________________

Being dead has certain advantages. Vale of tears, etc., but also:

You lose weight.

No more walking the dog while he wanders around picking his spot, forcing you to contemplate how his bowels work, if they are different then ours, if he feel… Read full post »

This was added to the mayhem of yesterday's Israel melee posts as a comment. It is, I guess, a kind of manifesto.

________________
I care very much about accuracy and fair play.

To post in some OS threads is to step onto a precipice. I had decided to just not engage with… Read full post »

1. I was raised in lovely and spectacular Kansas but yearned, growing up, for something else, something Not-Kansas: elevation, distinctiveness, importance. I only now appreciate how much Kansas shaped me, how my poetry soars up from the veloured green grassiness, the empty wintry blank, the thunderhe… Read full post »

I am in a transcendant state of sadness, beauty and yearning after seeing "Slumdog Millionaire". You will end up seeing this movie, so go see it now.

There is nothing like it. It is the essence of suffering childhood, it seems to breathe in and out the clutched chest, lidless hope and… Read full post »

First, credit due:

Roy Blount's new book on Words (Alphabet Juice), is part of a family tradition. His ancestor Thomas Blount wrote "Glossographia" in 1656. Who knew.

In the NYRB (12/18/08), James Gleick describes Blounts wonderful new argument and term -- "Sonicky" -- that persuades for a new, extende… Read full post »

My grandmother Nana was kind to me as a boy, disarmed my cruel father, held our family together, and we failed her.

I imagine my sister and I, leading my family, someday, my three brothers, my mother, all of us, in an act of repentance. In a circle, around a picture of… Read full post »

I want to run away.

I imagine a Trailways bus: the night of Pennsylvania,
Ohio at sunrise, Iowa flat, tree-rimmed and winter-grey,
across the Mississippi while I sleep, stiff and aching into
the meagre riffles of western Nebraska, and finally home
to the big, cold rocks.

There is no… Read full post »

I read in the early morning light, blue from deep snow and pine outside my bedroom window,  how in the early 1500s Neapolitan monks interpreted Plato's ""Forest" as meaning the material world, and applied pagan ideas of Diana to themselves, hunting for Plato's "essence" (God); I believe this sim… Read full post »

I know small things are books, but I dream of
arenas and catacombs and orchestras of books
and more: shoals of books, broached
by whole triremes of editions,
galleys, manned by learned Proofs,
whose rams are La Fontaine pens, who spill

worthy word phalanxes onto
alphabet beaches limned with
encyclopedi… Read full post »

I say, I try to say: I didn't understand, I didn't grow up. I didn't know how much...

Wet are my hands, my arms, my cheeks and my chin, all kinds of wet: fresh ropey wet from my nose like a river from my skull; slow wet from the corner of… Read full post »